Thursday, January 31, 2013

This is an interesting Debate that was recently posted on the Debunking Christianity blog. Both men did a pretty good job on their own. I do think that James Kurtz brought things I have really wished that more Christians bring up in debates on this subject while August Berkshire seemed to just summarize the "best" arguments of atheism on this subject.

Kurte made some points that should be deeply considered:

1. Damage to the physical brain does not show that there is no soul.
2. Free Will is part of this discussion
3. God gives unbelievers the ability to do moral action and recognize morality just like God does to unbelievers
4. God gave us life so God has every right to determine when and how those lives end.

Now here is a gem. David Wood and Pastor Joseph discuss Shabir Ally's teaching regarding Jesus' Crucifixion. Amazingly, the majority of Muslims deny that Jesus was crucified on a cross by the Romans despite this being a fact of history. How does Shabir Ally reconcile this with Islam? Really badly. This point is the main reason to deny Islam. The Quran says that Jesus did not die the way everything we know says He did. David Wood does a real good job in laying this out.

Video Description: Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto has created a beautiful, undeniably scary time-lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions which have taken place between 1945 and 1998, beginning with the Manhattan Project's "Trinity" test near Los Alamos and concluding with Pakistan's nuclear tests in May of 1998. This leaves out North Korea's two alleged nuclear tests in this past decade (the legitimacy of both of which is not 100% clear).

Each nation gets a blip and a flashing dot on the map whenever they detonate a nuclear weapon, with a running tally kept on the top and bottom bars of the screen. Hashimoto, who began the project in 2003, says that he created it with the goal of showing"the fear and folly of nuclear weapons." It starts really slow — if you want to see real action, skip ahead to 1962 or so — but the buildup becomes overwhelming.

Jenni Mair has posted an article suggesting that the Duggar family that is the subject of a reality show about raising 19 children are horrible people against women and in conspiracy to destroy society because they think that there is a huge parallel between the Jewish Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany and the 56 million abortions each year. I wonder if Mair knows what a holocaust is. Maier wrote:

There’s nothing I hate more than people who have the audacity to compare the Holocaust to anything that’s not the Holocaust. It’s not a synonym for “something I don’t like” and it’s not a word to toss around for political reasons. It’s an event in recent history that resulted in the systematic murder of six million people. SIX MILLION LIVING AND BREATHING HUMAN BEINGS. People who had jobs and lives and families and histories before being enslaved, tortured and murdered.
To compare their lives to the lives of developing fetuses disgusts me. You want to be anti-choice, fine be anti-choice. But don’t make inane comparisons that attempt to say that what happens during abortion is anywhere near what happened during The Holocaust. It isn’t. At all.

I agree that "holocaust" should not be used lightly or casually. But when you look at what abortion is, I'm not sure one cannot make such a comparisons. Just look at what was written and ask how does this not apply to abortion?

It’s a repeated event in recent history that results in the systematic murder of Fifty-six million people. FIFTY-SIX MILLION LIVING AND BREATHING HUMAN BEINGS. People who could have had jobs and lives and families and histories but instead were tortured and murdered.

Maier attempts to avoid the weight of this by claiming that the lives of "developing fetuses" are not worthy of being compared with the value of the six million who were killed by the Nazis. Why? I believe that a person is a person from the moment of conception and worth just as much as any human being at any stage in life. Why? Even prior to birth, a human baby is capable of feeling pain and responds to his/her environment. Some methods of abortion actually does cause pain and I see no reason to think that it's not torture. As a human being I am not qualified to determine the value and worth on one person over another. Many people passionate about protecting abortion rights say that it because they care about women, but I never hear them explain how do they propose to help women who have been traumatized emotionally and physically due to abortions. Both the woman and child suffer.